Your brand’s style/personality for email opens: a bad trade

Creating an email marketing campaign that generates a lot of opens is the best feeling in the world.

Brands love it because it means they’ll make more revenue, marketers love it because it means they’ve done their job well, and we at Phrasee love it because there was probably an awesome subject line involved (which is a good thing for everyone).

But like all good things, email marketing opens can come at a cost.

Sure, there are nefarious ways to boost open rates for an email marketing campaign. Open-bait or blatantly dishonest subject lines, for example, will probably get you loads more opens. In the long run, though, the price of employing such tactics is too high. That’s why any email marketer worth their salt would never use them.

But here’s the thing: even brands which take great care to avoid spammy tactics can wind up trading their brand’s style and personality just for marginal a boost in open rates.

And, in most cases, that trade simply isn’t worth making.

Here’s why…

Your brand’s style/personality for email opens: a bad trade

In email marketing, all that glitters is not gold.

This fact is particularly true as it applies to the glitteriest email marketing metric of all: The open rate.

While it is indeed true that an email marketing campaign’s open rate is usually the key determining factor in how many conversions and how much ROI the campaign will generate in the end, the vast majority of opens any campaign generates will result in nothing. This is one of the many harsh truths which every email marketer must accept.

Ready for another harsh truth? At every stage of the email marketing journey, from delivery to conversion, the language and design of your emails will have an impact on how your subscribers perceive your brand from that moment forward.

Every email which shows up in a subscriber’s inbox has the capacity to turn that subscriber off, impact your sender reputation, or even damage your brand.

Tread carefully

That’s why it is hugely important to make sure that every element of your brand’s marketing emails are on-brand and effective. While this is particularly true of your email subject lines, since they are the element of each email campaign which the most people will wind up seeing, it doesn’t end there. Quality body copy, design, calls to action, and a seamless cross-channel purchase journey should be on your radar as well.

Empowering email marketing departments to utilise their skills and knowledge to generate opens is largely a good thing for brands. Using effective email subject line copy is the truest path to obtaining those opens. However, since we already know that the language of email subject lines impacts overall brand perception, it is absolutely essential that that language lines up with your brand voice at all times.

Companies spend large sums of money creating and building their brands and brand voices, and for good reason. In the digital age, effective branding is becoming more important than ever. Minor missteps can have dire consequences, and brand loyalty and trust are running at an all-time low.

Maybe a clumsy, off-brand email subject line will pay off and slip by your subscribers unnoticed, but can any brand really afford to take that risk?